Get out your diaries, calendars and stone circles to set a date, folks: Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy (or P:NHEA, presumably pronounced 'ne-ah', what with the silent 'P' and all) is scheduled for a launch event at the Natural History Museum, London, on September 10th of this year (2013 for those of you in the future, reading this in your flying cars. How about you pay attention to the road instead of reading this, flyboy?). We're still putting together the details of what the launch will entail, but expect at least an evening lecture and probably some drinks after, either at the NHM or at an adjacent emporium.
The event does, of course, take place some time after the book will be available, which you already know is June 23rd. While we lose the element of surprise with the September date, it does give you plenty of time to order a copy so you can bring it along to get it signed by the author, making it marginally more valuable for when you decide to sell it on Ebay. The image above is another teaser for the content of the book, showing one of the 23 combined life and skeletal reconstructions that accompany the latter section, all of which are displayed in a quad-launch pose (book launch/quad launch... geddit?). This particular one shows Tupuxuara leonardii, a thalassodromid pterodactyloid from Brazil with a 4 m wingspan. Half of the image has already made it onto the Intertoobs, where it christened my Pterosaur.Net blog post on working as a palaeoartist, but you can now see the skeleton underlying the soft-tissues. It's largely based on the near-complete T. leornardii specimen IMCF 1052, with some assistance from other thalassodromid specimens to fill in the missing bits.
And finally...
In further PR related news, I've recently become a citizen in the land of Twitter, where you can follow me at the imaginative moniker @MarkWitton. My feed promises to relay all manner of pterosaur and palaeo news, blog updates and shiny new bits of art. Or maybe I'll just moan a lot about things. Or a bit of both. See you over there, in any case.